


Ground Control to Major Tom

by CrackleTack



Category: Farscape
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Gen, Post-Peacekeeper Wars, Sort Of, Surreal, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24547627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrackleTack/pseuds/CrackleTack
Summary: Whatever Einstein did to him at the fiery end of an event horizon, he suspects it was a lot messier then taking an eraser to his brain. Now John Crichton dreams about time and his own life and lunacy.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Ground Control to Major Tom

He used to dream of normal things; beer, football, sex, rocket engines, wading through blood in whatever passed for Moya's bilge while all the people he's killed claw at his ankles. Normal things. But now he mostly just dreams in time. 

When its late and still, and Moya's corridors are hushed, he dreams of stars turning inside out and galaxies flipping like coins on the universe's thumb. He dreams in blue and gravity and velocity, and when he wakes up he sees after images in the air, like radiation on the underside of the ocean. Sometimes he has blood under his nose. That's his brain on wormholes. 

Whats the old saying? Gone, but not forgotten. 

He's afraid to tell Aeryn, because it was supposed to be over for them, and in a way it is. Nobody is chasing them. Nobody has reason to. There are no more wanted beacons and no more bounty hunters. They are Persona Non Grata as far as the empires of the galaxy are concerned, but there are no quick fixes in this universe, no Dues ex Machina for John Crichton. Everything comes at a cost and something ruptured inside him that day over Diminosh. Whatever it was left him collapsed on Moya's deck and made a hole in his mind that still feels sore. 

He tries to ignore it. That's easier when the arns are filled with feeding and soothing and swaddling baby D'argo. He can walk and talk and put on his pants and his gun. He sings about cows jumping over the moon and gets baby sick burped up on his shoulder. But he still feels it behind him, every microt of every day. It waits in the corner of his eye and he hates turning around. He's taken to circling Moya's corridors so that he never walks backward. 

Aeryn hasn't said anything yet, but she will. It's only a matter of time.

He keeps his chin up and eyes locked and the ache gets better, little by little, day by day, cause by effect, but he's always afraid that one step back at the wrong time will make him lose his place in the here and now. He has to hold onto Moya's ribs to remember when and where he is, and if he's tired, or not paying attention, he picks at the edges of the hole in his mind like a dimensional scab. 

At night he falls through it like Humpty Dumpty toppling off the wall.

It always starts with something familiar but terribly far away. Tonight he dreams about sitting on a rock in a primeval desert, on Earth. In the valley below him Eidalons in red robes are stealing blood from Neanderthals while they sleep. No one notices the Homo-Sapien man in black leather watching them from a distant rock. It's very Planet of the Apes. The sound of an alien choir fills his head praying “don't let them use it,” and a wormhole bursts in his eye like a capillary. 

He blinks, rubs his face and turns away.

When he opens his eyes again he's in Memphis, looking up at the night sky. His parents are kissing through the first showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He can see them canoodling in the back seat of his dad's Ford's Mustang from where he stands, lost among the popcorn and squeaking tires of an outdoor theater. The movie screen takes up half the sky and obscures the stars and three hours later his dad’s car rocks, and John Crichton is conceived as a fetus floats past the moon on screen. 

He knows he shouldn’t be here. His place of origin is under embargo, but his wanderings are unskilled at best. He doesn't know where to go or how to get there, much less how to stop, because he doesn't remember how he started. 

Strangely though, he thinks Einstein is still better teacher then Jack was. Jack gave him the run of a macrocosm and the first thing he did was burn his hands on infinity. Einstein took away the big toys after John fed a planet and two armies to the maw of a black hole. John has a suspicion that he's been put in the cosmic version of a play pen. So he makes cats cradles with string theory, draws equations in crayon and spins wormholes like tops in his head. 

He lives in an elliptical principal of stability. Which isn't so strange anymore. His sanity has been a moon of his orbit for very a long time. Some days it's closer to him, and some days it's very far away. He even wrote a theorem on it. He called it the circumgyration of lunacy, and drew a moon with a rocket in its eye under the math. An omage to Le Voyage dans la Lune. He figured nobody would ever have to appreciate the joke. 

Of course he may have sabotaged himself by thinking that, because there is one person who would laugh at insanity being an evolutionary mutation of survival in a universe that measures time by the birth and death of suns. Himself. When he throws himself out of the scene of his own conception his feet stumble from a dirt packed car lot right onto Moya's hard, warm floor. Half a metra away John Crichton Jr. is sprawled under the engine of his module, covered in grease and Memnix fluid and tinkering away. 

“Oh frell.” 

His brain liquefies a little further, and he reaches for Moya's walls, trying not to hurl. It's going to be a long frelling fall and he only just dropped off. 

Junior is wearing a grey tac shirt and the soft blue cargo pants that he worked to threads cycles ago. Left over Peacekeeper gear they'd salvaged from somewhere. He's not wearing a gun so it can't be long after his first wormhole jump. He still looks like a cast away. Junior has more weight then him though. He's gotten pale and rangy in space and it shows. This Crichton looks well fed, fresh from atmo and a place with sun. He's so frelling young. It's hard to believe he's only four cycles away from this man. He isn't even thirty five but he feels frelling ancient; time-worn, like Jack. 

He can't quite resist taking a closer look at himself though and stalks closer, leather pants creaking as he approaches the younger man. Curiosity made him the most wanted man in the galaxy. You'd think he'd learn, but he's only human. At least that's what he tells himself. 

“How did it get so late so soon?” he wonders, rubbing his lip, and then snickers at his own joke. 

Which is a mistake, because Junior looks up and sees him. He meets his own eyes. They're red rimmed and a little blood shot. Might be from crying, or it might be from staying up way past a sane man's bed time because there's too much to see and do, and the light never changes on Moya.

“Oh god, I'm hallucinating.” Junior wipes at his mouth. “Peacekeeper Crichton. There's frelling a nightmare.”

“I'm not a Peacekeeper,” he says, without thinking. He cocks his head and Junior does too, following him with sleep deprived curiosity. “And you've never had a nightmare.” Not yet, he thinks. Not really. 

Junior still has that look of constant bewilderment. He's still trying to comprehend everything around him, instead of rolling with it and checking his oil cartridge. He still wants to go home and thinks that's on Earth. Every time someone fires a gun, every time he's afraid for his life Junior is wishing with every atom in his body that he was in his old garage, where the most dangerous thing he had to worry about was getting grease on his shirt. 

He wonders if he's killed yet. It's strange, but he doesn’t remember his first time. That should be something that sticks with you.

He wants to say something to him. Something that will make what he's going to live through bearable. He wants to tell him that he’ll fall in love with wonders a sane man would call nightmares. He wants to tell him that life is a collection of kisses and gun shots, and that horror is as relative as time. He wants to tell him that he's wasting his tears right now, because he has no frelling idea how bad it can get and he'll need them later. But he said he wasn't a Peacekeeper, so he shouldn't act like one.

Instead he stretches a hand across a lifetime and touches his own cheek as softly as he can. He watches his younger self flinch and stare at him in bleary eyed awe.

“Earth was always too small for us,” is all he says. 

He wonders if this man can comprehend what he would miss, if he could go back. He held onto his illusions for a long time. He dreamed of Earth like a kid sucking their thumb at night to keep away the monsters, just to have some familiar comfort in this spinning kaleidoscope of dread and splendor. Sometimes that was all that got him out of bed, but when he's honest with himself, when he can look time and reality in the face, he knows that he was never going back. 

John Crichton's chance of going “home” went up in pulse fire the microt he walked onto a Gammak base. Once Scorpy saw him it was all over. That gave the man in front of him a finite span of time to escape. One cycle to make it back to Earth and still feel human on the other side.

Maybe not even that. 

Jack was stirring wormholes into his head a quarter of a cycle before Scorpy caught him so he might only have a three monens, maybe six depending how long he's been out here. It's an impossibly brief chance. He wonders if this man still has that, or if Jack has played hey diddle diddle on his brain already. 

But wait. Go back further. Listen. 

He's back on Earth, in a beat up garage that smells like drugs. He can feel the heat of Florida and see Karen Shaw's orange dress and bright buckle shoes. He remembers the grey make-up that never smudged but sweated like skin. He remembers her total confidence that he would make it to space. The pretty white haired girl who heard his ambitions, and kissed them better. Her face is familiar now. A galaxy came for him when he was sixteen and didn't have a clue, and when his body convulses in the back of old Betty, his orgasm is a dimensional continuum.

He screams.

He's in The Chair, wrists bound while the force of an Aurora centrifuge pulls out his memories and he spins, spins, spins. Scorpius hangs on the bars, watching him, and the delusion turns back on itself like a popped worm hole. 

This was the life of John Crichton; human, astronaut, Lost Boy. Before Scorpy, before Jack, even before he fell through that first wormhole and dropped into a space battle straight from Industrial Light and Magic, he was frelling with the sequence of his own life. Forget losing his virginity to a girl who understands rebellion from the wrong side of the galaxy, tonight he watched his parents frell him into existence in the back of his dad's Mustang. 

And there he is, on Scorpy's instant replay, a man who looks like his future dressed in black leather, eyes swirling with the same rotational force of The Chair and quoting Dr. Suess. A geometric alteration of events. There he is again, John Crichton all grown up in dirty jeans, jumping on Betty's flatbed. 

“How do you know that?” he asks himself, voice cracking with puberty. 

“The same way I know you helped DK cheat on his SATs” He answers with a hard voice.

He's looking at himself from four different points in time while he sits here losing his mind.

He starts laughing. “It's déjà vu all over again!”

“Mark that,” Scorpius orders his Peacekeeper aid. “And increase extraction. I want it all.” 

God he knew. From day one, Scorpius frelling knew.

The chair spins faster. His mind is stripped, his life ripped into catalogued pieces, and he wails just like he did the day he was born in a Memphis hospital. He doesn't know how he knows that. 

Then he's somewhere else. Sound has weight, and gravity tastes like blood and burnt Chakan Oil. He's holding his ears trying to keep his brain inside his head and screaming his lungs inside out. He's wandered out of the play pen, but Einstein is there. Black eyes, cold touch. Everything starts slowing down. 

Time passes. It's recess. 

This happens sometimes, and when Einstein puts him in time out he usually sits on an iceberg at the end of the universe, holding a fishing pole until he feels three dimensional again. He's not sure what he's supposed to catch out here, but the feel of the casting rod in his palm is comforting. Galaxies swirl under his feet and a sign for Sawyer's Mill stands on the ice. 

Spending his sleep cycle like this can't be restful. He has a baby to take care of back home and at this rate he's not sure he'll be able to stand much less do diaper duty. He tries to explain to this Einstein.

“Please. Make this stop.”

“Expansion cannot be stopped, only experienced until a state change redefines the variable.” Is his warden's very unhelpful reply.

“I am not the Big Bang, Einstein. I do not expand!” He cries.

Einstein doesn't blink. “The more compact the material the more finite its concept.”

He crushes his head against imaginary ice and groans. “So my density has brought me to you.”

He starts singing Sweet Lorraine. 

“Time,” Einstein calls.

John closes his eyes. Recess is over.

He feels like he's in that old college dream, sitting naked in class with a test you didn't study for. Except he doesn't get a failing grade if he screws ups here. He's dead. Stellar Nurseries drift over his head and from cycles away he hears Aeryn telling him that there's no room for mistakes, because if you frell up the simulator kills you. 

He thought the phrat hazing at Alien U was bad as a freshman, but its got nothing on the doctorate program, and he never did explain Animal House to Zaahn. When he finally had the opportunity, she'd been dead two cycles. He wonders what she would have had to say about all this. She always had a way of bringing lucidity to his mad alien playground. Or least a perspective that was a little less terrifying. Which was funny, really, because she was probably the maddest one of them all in the beginning. Her and Rygel.

“If you ask me it's frelling ludicrous!” Rygels gummy old voice suddenly echoes back to him and he turns and opens his eyes.

He's standing in a long grey hall that looks like a concrete trap. The place is eery and silent except for the burbling motor of Rygel's throne and the slug's heavy breathing. Rygel's shadow is hovering in front of a bright, rigid set of cell bars. Inside Zaahn is sitting with her back to a wall, wearing an ugly brown jumpsuit. 

She looks up and sees him, then smiles.

“Hello John,” she says.

He shivers. He's cold and dripping wet, losing bits of ice from the chunks clutched in his hands. 

Rygel doesn't turn around, doesn't care that he's there, doesn't seem to even notice him. The Hynerian just looks furiously at Zaahn, eyebrows practically vibrating as he heaves himself up in his seat. 

“Who are you talking to now? More spirits?” Rygel demands.

“It is Crichton,” Zaahn says, serene as ever. It's less comforting to see that when she's wearing dark red prison garb. She's not even looking at Rygel.

“Well that should be a short conversation,” Mr Toad the Sixteenth mutters. “He's dead Zaahn, and he wasn't much of a conversationalist when he was alive.”

“I'm not dead,” he whispers, but it sounds a little uncertain to his own ears. 

“Yes,” Zaahn nods, but her voice sounds wet and he can't tell if she's speaking to him or Rygel.

“Listen to me, you Delvian fool,” Slugweed snaps. “You may not care if these fekiks execute us all tomorrow but I'll be a Poknup's Uncle if I wasted all that frelling time getting us out of one prison just so we can die in another! If you can't act sane tomorrow than at least do us the favor of keeping your big blue mouth shut!” And Rygel turns his chair and floats away muttering, “If we get off this rock I'll be the luckiest Hynerien since Rygel the 8th. I should ask the litigators for a gag.”

Rygel never looks at him, even when he's a hand length away and could reach out and flick one of his eyebrows. Buckwheat just floats past him as if he isn't there. Maybe he isn't. 

He watches the old slug until his shadow disappears into harsh white lights. The jail, and it must be jail because it has that feel of piss and sorrow and solitude crammed into as tight and painful a space as possible, is silent. He walks up to Zaahn's cell and leans his head against the bars wishing he could reach her.

She stands and shuffles to the bars, manacles tinkling around her ankles. She reaches through the bars and lays her hands on his and when they touch a tear runs down her delicate plastids. 

“Hey, blue,” he whispers. 

Zaahn is as beautiful as he remembers her, kind eyes and blue veins that look like wormhole ripples. The old feeling wells up in him again, the one that always sent him running to her with questions and bruises, confident that somehow she would soothe everything. 

“I'm so sorry, John.”

“What for?”

“For leaving you.”

He shakes his head, wipes her tears away with a thumb and says, “That's my line.” 

He wants to say “I miss you,” but doesn't dare. He doesn't know what time it is here and Einstein's lessons have left a lump of fear in his aorta that's swollen with regrets and failures that can't be kissed better.

“Zaahn?”

“Yes, John?”

“What does madness look like to you?"

Her face is taut but she reaches through the bars and touches his head, light as a falling petal and finally says, “A hole in space.”

He shivers and risks a look over his shoulder wondering if she can see the black thing at his back. The globe lights of the jail make it hard to see anything but misery though, and Zaahn only has eyes for him.

“A hole?”

“Yes,” she nods. “An isolated cell of metal on a ship far from any living thing, without soil or sun, and nothing but memories and regrets to occupy my time.”

“Time,” he sighs. It all comes back to time. “You know, back on Earth there was a man named Aristotle, who said that time is just a human way of accounting for how things change.”

“A wise man,” Zaahn smiles. He's not sure if that's a benediction or a title, but it doesn't really matter. “Was he a friend of yours?”

He laughs. He can't help it, even though its a little stiff, sort of like how your face feels after getting tears and snot dried on it.

“Well I studied him. He also said 'No great mind ever existed without a touch of madness'. I think if that's the price we pay I'd really like to be small, and ordinary instead. What do you think Zaahn? Can we still cash in our chips for refund?” 

She looks lost, like him, her face is filled with care and bafflement.

“Your spirit is wounded,” she says as if that answers everything.

“Yeah.” He feels frelling mutilated, and looking at her through the bars he knows he's not the only one. 

“What pains you, John? How can I ease your soul?”

“I don't know. I guess ... I worry that I'm not human anymore,” he confesses to his priest, and mother, and mentor.  
Zaahn weeps.

“I am so sorry I--” She pulls him closer, tries to put their heads together as if one or both of them can fit through the bars. “I promise you, I will make my last wish of Moya to retrieve your bodies. It is the least we should have done.”

He shakes his head. He knows they're talking out of sync, losing meaning in the gap between different perspectives of time, but its all he has right now and he's desperate. 

“My body's fine Zaahn, maybe a little more butchered, but that besides the point. This isn't about my life, its about my humanity.”

Zaahn frowns. “I'm not sure I understand the distinction.”

“Humanity. It's who we are, the good, the bad, the certifiable. It's supposed to be the best of ourselves, but sometimes it's just...” he tries to think. He rubs his face, helpless in the limits of his language. “It's American Pie. It's swimming naked with Gators. It's dancing in a hurricane, punk rock and King Cole and football, banana hammocks and vagina monologues...” he trails off. “It's not _this_.” It's not Einstein's state of mind. 

“Is being humanity important to you?” Zaahn asks.

He gives her a _look_.

“Well, it's defining, I guess, and if I am becoming something else, if I'm not human anymore, than what the frell am I?”

Zaahn was silent for a long time, and then strokes his cheek and asks. “Does it matter?”

He considers.

“I don't know.” 

He's left so much of Earth behind him, become so different, and at the end of the day does having an existential crisis about his life actually matter? Do metaphysical panic attacks every night change anything about how he lives, aside from disturbing his sleep? If he's looking for boundaries to map the territory of his existence after Diminosh, are his hang ups about human nature really the hill he wants to die on? 

“I'm afraid.” He finally says. Which is the only real thing he's sure of.

“The Seek teaches that we all change with time, sweet John,” Zaahn says. “But each past is our own. Our actions and our choices determine what we make of ourselves. Innocence may bloom only once, our bodies and our minds may be desecrated by circumstance, but we can always choose compassion over cruelty.”

He's not sure he believes that anymore, it seems more like a souvenir of the past then the future, but he likes the sound of it. His mother would have liked it too.

“I wish you could have met my mom,” he says, fingers trailing over the scale shaped plastids on Zaahn's wet cheeks. She smiles at him.

“And I would be honored to meet her. Perhaps one day I will bring her word of you.”

He closes his eyes, pulls back from old pains and new regrets.

“She’s dead.” He stops his mouth just short of saying “and so are you.”

His mom always talked about fate. When he was young he thought that was a joke, but the longer he's out here the more seriously he starts to take it, and he thinks now they were both right. His fate was as real as time and it is a joke, but the joke's on him. Which came first? The wormhole or the fool who traveled it? Solving that seems as pointless as trying to prove the existence of the present.

He loses his grip on Zaahn's cell door thinking about it. Her touch fades into a damp wind. Then he's in Cape Canaveral National Cemetery surrounded by rows of perfectly uniform white tombstones standing like a Peacekeeper regiment at attention.

The sky is a haze of dusky red clouds lit up like the petals of Cyrsterium Utilia. He walks through the graves with an unfinished equation bleeding in his head, demanding he find it's solution. But there's no marker he recognizes here. He knows where he is but not when. He could be looking at one in a million sunsets over Florida. 

The wet heat follows him through the cemetery soaking his shirt with unshed grief until he finds the family plot. There's his grandfather, and Great Uncle, and his cousin Bob, his nephew's namesake, and next to them is the grave of one Leslie, Grace Crichton. 

He crouches over her grave, running his hand along the marble headstone and wishing he could touch her face instead. He tries to remember if he ever saw her grave when he was on Earth, and he can't. He doesn't know if that's because the memory got cut out of him, or if he was a coward and never came to see her. Even odds really. He remembers the suit he wore for the funeral but he doesn't have any idea if he saw her lowered into the earth. 

Someone has left her flowers. A bouquet of Bird of Paradise lie on her grave. Her favorite flower. He strokes the pointed petals and gets pollen on his hands. 

Then he blinks and he's crouching in a field of pale yellow grass, the sky is blue and the air is cool. His sweat and ice soaked shirt quickly chills and he stands.

At the top of the hill a golden space pod sits in the grass. He's seen it before. The image of that pod is as indelible as Scorpius's black lipped grin. The pod's stairs are down and there's blood on the steps. It already smells like misery. He doesn't need to go inside to know what's there. 

Instead he walks the hill, and the grass brushes his sides, kissing Streliztia pollen from his finger tips. He finds a place to sit. He waits. Time turns. He watches the grass wilt and grow again, watches the pod age and settle deeper into the soil, watches the first buds of flowers begin to bloom on the hill and then grow tall and spread until the grass is competing with a whole field of Bird of Paradise from his own mother's grave. 

He watches a familiar figure with a withered white face and a black suit climb up the hill with a pack on his back. Scorpius doesn't see him kneeling in the grass. He watches Scorpius caress his mother's flowers. Watches him break one open and pocket the seeds. Thinks about the spoonful of grey matter Scorpius took from his head, and about what he's been left with at the end of it all.

Maybe it was always a stupid thought but he just figured if he could get what Jack put in his head out of it again, than somehow everything would be ok. That'd he'd be normal again. Frell, they used Stark's head like a bank vault to make deposits and withdrawals, why couldn't Einstein do the same with him? It was all just electrical signals, right? Or, maybe, he was a little jealous of his old two faced cell mate. 

He wants to believe what Harvey told him. He wants it so bad it hurts, but he keeps dreaming like this and every morning he wakes up in a cold sweat, as if the hours he's spent running from one point in time to another are as real as the mobile spinning over D'argo's crib.

Whatever Einstein did, whatever happened that day at the fiery end of an event horizon, he suspects it was much messier then taking an eraser to his brain. He can't shake the feeling that when he bowed his head on Einstein's little ice cap he agreed to something he doesn't quite comprehend. 

He thinks Harvey knew that too. Because even while the clone was saying his 'purpose' had been neatly tied up with a cinematic ending, Harvey was wily in his choice of venue. He dressed up his goodbye by playing David Bowman on his death bed. That was no accident and neither, John thinks, was the black monolith at his back. Maybe Harvey had already seen the holes Einstein left behind and was giving him a visual vocabulary for it, as a warning, or an apology. 

Or maybe it was Harvey's way of admitting that John had always been as incomprehensible to him, as a monolith in the shape of a tombstone was to men in space suits. That all his sly hints that he knew their shared mind better then John was another lie. That when it came to the nature of John Crichton's universe, Harvey was as ignorant as a make believe ape with a bone club. 

Or Harvey was just frelling with him, and one day he’d pop up in an orangutan costume with a tie and a suitcase. It wouldn’t be the first time he played dead, but for now, where Harvey once lurked in his neuron's there's a black hole in the shape of a grave.

He thinks about death. 

He thinks about memorials.

And then he's standing on a massive tiered deck in space. The metal is dark and polished and above him is an open view of the stars. Hundreds more decks just like it drift by with cosmic dust orbiting them like rings of ashes. Its beautiful, a horrendous monument of regret made manifest. But the size of it is still infinitesimally small compared to the planet which used to be here. 

He would never even guess this is where Diminosh used to be if he didn't recognize the smell of this place; gun smoke and water and D'argo's afterbirth.

There's a service in progress. Every level of the deck is filled with a crowd bumping spines and tentacles together. He has a good view, up top on the last row as he is. Far below him a Sebecean woman stands at a podium, giving a speech. Everyone's eyes and antenna are trained on her, everyone except for two Sebeceans quietly sitting one level below him. They're looking up at the sky and the dust, and all that remains of the planet he destroyed.

They're dressed in grey and black. The woman has a scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face, and the man's got a hood pulled low over his, but he knows them anyway. He'd know himself anywhere, any time, and he's not the only one. 

The man cocks his head like he's heard something, then turns and looks up at him and he gets an eyeful of what age has in store for him.

The John Crichton below him is an old man, his hair is grey, his face is craggy and he's wearing a beard. It's not wild like the castaway scruff from his days in the leviathan burial space. It's well trimmed and neat and Aeryn doesn't hate it if the way her fingers are playing with the sideburns are anything to go by. 

Yes, the woman at his side is Aeryn and she's old too, he realizes. Her face is lined and her black hair is shot with white and that's... not right. The speech from the podium drifts over them. 

“And here we stand over a hundred cycles later, to renew our commitment to keeping the peace--” 

A hundred cycles? Oh God. He shouldn't even be alive and he looks like he's only sixty. He feels dizzy and white knuckles the bench under his ass.

Maybe it's a consequence of time in space. Maybe he's lived less, or longer, from spending his days without a gravitational axis. Or maybe mucking around in the past and future is aggravating the effect of time ticking slower for his feet then his head. Of course that would depend on wear his head is pointed and what his feet are standing on.

The crowd is starting to spin around him. He claps a hand on his mouth, and tries to hold onto his insides. The next thing he knows he's being shoved into an alcove at the back of the crowd, where he promptly loses the contents of his stomach on the shiny black floor. It's polished so bright that he can see his reflections staring back at him. Both of them. The old man wearing his face is holding him while he tries to keep his grip on time. 

“I can't-,” he chokes.

“Just breathe,” Old Crichton interrupts. 

Is he having a panic attack? It feels like it. He's gasping like a fish on the end of his dad's hook when they were fishing. He feels himself start to fall. He can smell the water from the old mill and the sharp tang of worm bait and fish guts. Then he's being yanked the other way and he falls against the shoulder of Old Man Crichton's coat. His face is pressed against old leather with that lingering odor of Chakan oil. His own voice is in his ear.

“Breath in. Count backwards from ten.” He starts reeling off numbers. “Now breath out. That's good.”

“We don't have time for this,” Aeryn says from somewhere above them. He looks up. She's standing in her “guard” position, with one hand inside her coat where he knows she keeps a hidden pistol, or three. He starts laughing. Or crying. It's hard to tell which. He sounds hysterical. 

“We'll _make_ time,” the Old Man replies. She does that thing with her eyebrows where she's deigning to share a private joke with him. Old Man sighs and says, “Aeryn, gimme a break ok, he doesn't know what he's doing yet!”

His future looks back at him with that same weird, sad affection he felt for his teenaged self when he left him drugged in the back of his truck in the eighties. A look that says, 'boy, you have no idea.' 

“He's so young,” Old Man murmurs and looks up at Aeryn, shaking his head. “Were we ever this young?”

“You were,” She smirks.

John doesn't want to hear this and he puts his head between his knees and covers his face because frell it. He knows what he had to survive to make it this far. He knows all the carnage that turned four cycles into a lifetime and left him looking back at himself with pity. He does not want to know what he'll have to live through for this Old Man to call him young.

Old Man knows this, probably. He puts a hand on him, runs it over his head. He wears gloves, black with grey metal guards on the knuckles. 

“Look at me,” his future says. He does. There's pity in those old eyes but something else too. Something he's not sure he recognizes in his own face anymore. Contentment?

“Wormholes are the tip of your iceberg,” the Old Man says, like a doctor delivering bad news. “It's not over, but you're gonna be ok.” 

He's not sure he believes that, but he desperately wants to hear it. Which this old frellnik probably knew too. The old man sighs and kisses his brow. 

“Are you gonna tell me not to frown so much?” he asks, wheezing a little. Old Man just rubs his back and watches the crowd with Aeryn. They don't say anything else, but the couple stay with him until he starts breathing normally and he no longer feels a mistake away from Ape City. 

Eventually Old Man Crichton stands and takes Old Aeryn's hand. She steps in close and kisses him. 

“Time?” she asks.

Old Man nods, then raises a hand, pointing one finger at a star far off in the sky before looking back at him.

“When you need to find where you live, just remember, second star to the right and straight on 'till morning.” 

The Old Man winks at him while Aeryn stares over his shoulder and he realizes that she hasn't looked at him. Not once. Then the old couple step off the edge of the deck into space. He staggers up just in time to see them disappear in blue light, but there's no wormhole. No colossus twister appears to swallow up the sun or drifting debris. No one at the memorial sees a thing. One minute the old couple is there, the next there's a wink in space and they're just gone. 

He gapes. He feels as slack jawed as he must have looked his first day on Moya. He looks back at the star the Old Man pointed to, the brightest one in the sky. He closes his eyes, recenters his mental chart, breathes and tries to think of the smell of home. Aeryn's hair, little D's skin and baby blanket, Chianna's sweat, even Rygel and Granny and the diapers he knows are waiting for him.

A star flares. He takes a running leap toward the morning. Time spins. 

And he wakes up. 

He almost can't believe it was that easy, but he blinks away the blue burn of space time and rolls over, and Aeryn is there. His Aeryn, young and little haggard looking from lost sleep. He noses her hair. It's all black. Not a single grey strand to be seen.

“How long was I out?” he asks.

“Not long. Are you all right?”

She asks that every morning now. It seems like a victory every time he wakes up and neither of them can bear taking it for granted. He runs a finger over her mouth and eyes, tracing where her beautiful wrinkles will be someday.

“Someday,” he repeats in a whisper, “I will be.” And for the first time since little D was born he believes it. He isn't well now, and he might not be for a very long time, but he's awake. He can get up and tie his boots and bathe his son and forget about what he may or not be for a few beautiful arns. It's a new day and they take what they can get. 

Maybe in the end, time is just a new language he's learning, and what defines what we're capable of imagining more then the words we speak and the idioms we think in? By that definition he'll be human as long as he's quoting Elmur Fudd, and he'll have a home no matter how far he strays in time, or sanity, as long as he has a star to steer by.


End file.
